Cartoonist's Jeep Injures The Hand That Gave It Fame

NAMES & FACES

October 29, 1991

Political cartoonist Bill Mauldin smashed his drawing hand while working on a Jeep bought in 1946 and used as a model for his satirical sculpture of a GI shooting a Jeep.

Chris Mauldin said her 70-year-old husband expects to regain use of the hand, injured Sunday in Santa Fe, N.M., when Mauldin jacked up the vehicle to attach a snowplow. The Jeep slipped, she said. The accident severed the tip of Mauldin's ring finger and badly cut his middle finger on his left hand.

Mauldin's comical characters, Willie and Joe, became symbols of luckless soldiers during World War II, and he won two Pulitzer prizes - in 1944 and 1959.